It is now common for users of electronic devices to electronically interact with other users and participate in group activities, including chat sessions, instant messaging, collaborative work projects, and multiplayer games. In particular, voice communication for gaming and other electronic activities is becoming increasingly popular for individuals connected over the Internet or other network. For those participating in multiplayer games, voice communication greatly expands the depth of enjoyment and social interaction between players of a game.
In many such applications, it is possible for users to remain anonymous while participating in groups, thereby reducing any apprehension about participating in sensitive group discussions, offering unconventional ideas, or taking other socially risky actions that the user might not otherwise take if the user's identity were known to others in the group. Thus, interaction with other users through such electronic communities and group sessions often enhances both an individual user's and the group's productivity, educational experiences, and entertainment.
Unfortunately, abuse of open forums often destroys the usefulness and enjoyment of such public forums for all but a select few. For example, the adoption of public Internet communication directories has been hampered (if not destroyed) by “adult material.” Experience has shown that when a directory of members in a group is publicly available for use, “adult” companies use such directories for advertising or transmitting sexually explicit material. Not only does the content of such advertising drive some users away, the experience of hosts for groups maintaining such directories has been that the sheer volume of such adult advertising targeting members of the group is so high that users interested in establishing a dialog relating to other topics have difficulty identifying legitimate members who are actually interested in non sexually explicit topics. At one time Microsoft Corporation maintained public Internet Lookup Service (ILS) directories for peer-to-peer communications on Microsoft company servers. After the initial release, adult material started showing up in larger and larger volumes, until the majority of the content in the directories related to sexually explicit material rather than the original topics of interest. This unwanted material so negatively impacted the usefulness of such directories for their intended personal or business communication use that Microsoft Corporation terminated the directory service.
Even when the majority of members in an online community adhere to defined or tacit codes of conduct, there is little that a community of users can do on their own to implement and enforce standards of conduct among the participants. Of course, if the communications of the electronic group are under the overall control of a third party host, the host can establish community standards and intervene when required. This approach works well in a conventional client/server environment, where individual members are each clients of a server, and communications between clients are managed by the server and the host who sufficient authority to control client use of the environment. Online game play is a prime example of this paradigm, because each gamer is a client of the game server. As long as the game server(s) provide communication services, text and/or voice, between different players, the host can exert control by controlling client access to the server(s). In a similar fashion, it would be desirable to provide a method and system for producing a trusted environment that facilitates the establishment of peer-to-peer communications amongst individual users.
Particularly when the primary role of a server is other than managing communications between clients, the aggregate volume of communications between clients can grow so large so as to place an undesirable burden on the server. In the example of the server hosting online game play, the amount of server overhead required to manage voice communications between players can be significant.
For example, massively multiplayer games are hosted by a large, centralized server (or group of servers) to which many thousands of clients may be connected. The centralized server is responsible for the “world state” and the client (i.e., the player's computer or game console) is responsible for the display of the world from that player's viewpoint, which is typically only a small portion of the entire world view. The client continuously sends the player's input and state to the server. The server updates the world and continuously returns new world information to the client.
Currently, all known massively multiplayer game networks route all communication through the central server. That is, if Player A wants to send a text message with Player B, Player A sends the message to the server and the server relays that message to Player B. There are many good reasons to do this:                With text chat, the additional bandwidth does not pose significant server overhead;        Peer-to-Peer connections take time to establish;        Peer-to-Peer connections may not work without additional help from the server;        “Fanning” the message to multiple players is efficiently done on the server; and        The sending player's IP address is “hidden” from the receiving player.        
However, voice chat requires significantly more bandwidth than does text chat, and thus, adding voice chat capability to massively multiplayer game networks becomes an immense burden on the central server hosting the game. It would therefore be desirable to provide a system and method for enabling game servers to facilitate peer-to-peer communications between players to reduce demands on server resources, while still providing a secure environment from which such peer-to-peer communications can be initiated.